When did Windows start accepting forward slash as a path separator?
Grant Edwards
grante at visi.com
Thu Sep 25 22:54:19 EDT 2003
In article <b16e4ef7.0309251550.724a57f at posting.google.com>, Stephen Ferg wrote:
> When did Windows start accepting the forward slash as a path separator
> character?
Sometime prior to 1983. DOS has always accepted it, and I assume Windows
always has as well.
> At one time, it was accepted as a truism that Windows (like MS-DOS)
> was different from Unix because Windows used the backslash as the path
> separator character,
Accepted as a truism by whom? DOS would accept either. The shell's "switch"
character was configurable as well -- it defaulted to '/' but changing it to
'-' was trivial.
> whereas Unix used the forward slash.
> But now, among a small group of cognoscenti, it is a truism that this
> is a myth, and that Windows will allow you to use either the forward
> or the backward slash as a pathname separator.
I don't remember if the actual DOS system calls accepted '/' or if the C
library translated. I do know that DOS C programs could use '/' for path
separator at least 20 years ago.
> I hypothesize that originally Windows accepted only the backslash, and then
> at some time it changed to accept the forward slash as well.
Nope. AFAIK, it's always accepted '/'. I did C programming on DOS for
years, and I always used '/' since it was too error working with string
literals in C that contain '\'. Those same programs seemed to run fine
under Windows.
> Does anyone know when that change occurred? Was it with the introduction of
> support for long filenames in NT and Win95?
I'm not aware that there has ever been a "change". '/' has been OK since
the early DOS days.
--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! WHOA!! Ken and
at Barbie are having TOO
visi.com MUCH FUN!! It must be the
NEGATIVE IONS!!
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